Unconscious relationship differs from conscious relationship and brings us
the things with which we have connected through the law of omission;
conscious relationship is union, and brings everything into expression
under the law of commission.
Both of these lines are constant and their results undeniable, but one
brings us the whole, the constructive, while the other opens our life for
the control of the destructive, the limited.
When thinking passes into a fixed power in our life, it may be used to
perfect or destroy the whole mechanism of our present and our future. Long
lines of conscious and unconscious thinking bring about certain
expressions, and these expressions in time become a part of our very
existence, and our environment, good or bad, bears witness to this
relationship.
One day upon the streets of Boston I saw an old woman selling newspapers;
her hair was gray, her skin brown and wrinkled, her clothing shabby and
only half sufficient for the chill of the hour; she was simply
poverty-stricken, and her old, thin, piping voice trembled as she called
her papers in an effort to compete with the crowds of newsboys around her.
Many bought her papers, drawn to her through pity, and her evident need. I
felt sorry that with her gray hair so near the grave life should have only
this to offer her, and I sought a reason for it. I asked her to tell her
story.
She was the daughter of a minister; her mother had been the proverbially
meek little woman of history, perfectly fitted to be her father's wife.
Her grandfathers on both sides of the parental tree had been ministers;
she gave me a graphic sketch of the long line of concentration which she
had been born into and in which she continued.
There was a long line for concentration and relationship with lowliness of
spirit, for grace, for the utter sinking of self; lack of demand for place
or power; lack of self-righteousness, absolute submission sown through
generations, sown for her in her own life. It had to bring forth its fruit
and it did bring it forth in the form of that gray-haired, beautiful,
ragged old woman, who, in the days of her declining years, gathered her
harvest on the cold streets of a rich city, underfed, poor and alone.
She was still true to her inherited concentration, for while I questioned
her she said, "Health, money and happiness were not for her," and that
"her family had borne the cross of poverty and sickness all their lives
and borne it nobly, and some day the Father would give them their reward."
Don't you see that the mind that is poised where her mind was, and where
her family's mind had been for generations, could not escape the law which
they had built for themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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